Friday, November 30, 2012

Happy Birthday, Sir Winston!

November 30, 1874 is the birthdate of the greatest statesman in
history. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan deemed him so. Just
his indomitable leadership in World War II rallying a beleaguered
Britain to triumph over Nazi tyranny would alone earn him this unique
distinction.

But the world is not aware that Churchill was a modern Nostradamus in
his prophetic wisdom. Among other things, he predicted two World Wars
and the Cold War. Even today’s headlines are the stuff of predictions he
made close to a century ago. In 1905, he foresaw the creation of the
Israeli State. Churchill was the first non-Jewish Zionist. Twelve years
before the Balfour Declaration, in 1917, Churchill called for a Jewish
State. It was not as if he represented New York’s Lower East Side or
Miami populated by Jews.

Then in 1921, in a speech to the House of Commons, he spoke of a
militant Islam sect, the Wahabis, more violent than any in history,
which would kill their own sisters for wearing the wrong attire. These
fierce zealots would terrorize the West with bomb-carrying Jihadists who
would burn embassies and destroy buildings by their passion to
sacrifice their lives for guarantee of Islam heaven. Winston Churchill
II would read his grandfather’s speech to President George W. Bush in
the White House in 2007. If Churchill didn’t exactly predict 9/11, he
described its radical extremist perpetrators.

President Nixon once told me that Churchill was the only leader who
seemed to have a crystal ball. He had “the mind of an historian and
courage of a soldier.” A scholar of history, he could see patterns
replicating themselves. Like a soldier, Churchill would risk political
death by telling the people what they didn’t want to hear. Spineless
politicians or cover-your-ass bureaucrats will never state the ugly
truths. Churchill, however, didn’t worry about repercussions. He didn’t
talk in euphemisms or evasions. He delivered the unvarnished facts.

The English did not want to hear, after the decimation of a whole
generation in World War I, the need to arm for another war threat by the
Germans in the 1930’s.

A decade later, Americans and British turned deaf ears to Churchill’s
warning that their recent ally, the Soviet Union threatened the
democracies of Europe. Even The Wall Street Journal—no left-wing
newspaper—denounced Churchill’s Iron Curtain Address. Eleanor Roosevelt
called Churchill a “war monger.”

In that same year, 1946, Churchill told Europeans gathering in an
assembly in Zurich that Germany, whose armies had only recently
devastated their countries, had to be welcomed back into its community
for the future prosperity of Europe. Boos accompanied his unwelcome
message. The Europeans were appalled that their World War II hero would
suggest such an idea.

For those who ask what relevance Churchill’s predictions have to
today’s world, they should keep in mind that he predicted the Energy
Crisis in 1929. He warned that the West needed new sources of fuel to
escape from being beholden to the oil oligarchies of the Middle East.
And then in 1957, this writer heard Churchill state that the U.N. was a
feckless organization, maimed by a congenital deformity—the Soviet veto—
and that it was increasingly dominated by one-party autocratic states.
One only has to note President Calderon who stuffs ballot boxes and
jails dissidents in Columbia while his country serves on the U.N. Human
Rights Commission; or even worse, President Assad of Syria who is
slaughtering thousands of his citizens while his country joins Columbia
on that Human Rights Commission that is attacking the U.S. for, among
other things, using capital punishment and the many African-Americans
serving in prison.

On his 138th birthday, the world should not only recognize
Churchill’s championship of freedom, but also study his many predictions
that still endanger our liberties and freedoms.

This website is dedicated to a renewal of Christian culture. It is inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, a valiant defender of Christian civilization, who believed "we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries." With Churchill, we believe that a "fraternal association" of the English-speaking peoples must "for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”